Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man

John Crace meets the author and psychologist with a penchant for controversy

Few
academics come close to Steven Pinker in his grasp of image and
imagery. With his trademark rock-star chic and an ear for a good
soundbite, he has risen steadily to the top of the academic pile. In
the heavily contested field of evolutionary psychology, Pinker has
managed to consistently make sure that his voice is heard above most
others, and along the way he has landed one of the top jobs at Harvard,
while his books are usually to be found on the bestseller lists. And
yet there is a twist. For a man who has dedicated a career to unpicking
the secrets of language and thought, he has surprisingly often failed
to make himself entirely clear to others. Either that, or he's a person
whom some people choose to misunderstand.

You either love Pinker
or you hate him. Indifference does not appear to be an option. He's
either the welcome breath of fresh air who has blown away the old guard
of behaviourist science in favour of an evolutionary, genetic approach
to human development and language, or he's some kind of
borderline-eugenicist, neo-Darwinian. There's little in-between.

Pinker
treats his books, for which he is best known by the general public, as
an intellectual and artistic licence, a medium that allows him to
explore ideas with a freedom not allowed in peer-reviewed journals. So
assertion and fact sometimes get conflated out of a desire to get the
message across clearly. Yet the truth is that Pinker is nowhere near as
confidently dogmatic as he can appear. Rather than trading in
certainties, Pinker's real currency is the far less sexy one of
statistical probability.

Certainty or best guess?

There's
a telling passage near the beginning of his most recent book on
language, The Stuff of Thought, in which Pinker makes the case for the
defence of President Bush. There is, he points out, a world of
difference between knowing something to be true and believing that you
know something to be true. And if Bush believed he knew that Saddam
Hussein was trying to stockpile nuclear weapons, then he isn't guilty
of lying. For some people, the difference between knowing and believing
may be just semantic wordplay, but for Pinker it is key to
understanding how we use and understand language. And it applies to him
as much as to anyone else. So how much of The Stuff of Thought is
certainty and how much is his best guess?

"I'm not sure I'm the
best person to ask," he says somewhat awkwardly. "I'm almost bound to
inflate the likelihood of being right. But I would say somewhere in the
region of 75%-90% is certain." He pauses for a short while. "Actually,
I'd like to revise that. I'd say it was more like 25%-90%." That's a
hell of a difference and a realistic appraisal of the limits of
scientific knowledge at the outer edges of human development. The
reality is that we don't know that much about language, thought and
consciousness; and all Pinker is doing with his work is presenting his
version as loudly and as clearly as possible.

Not that the
possible fallout of being wrong is nearly so brutal this time round
with The Stuff of Thought, as his exploration of the near universality
of metaphor, innuendo and swearing are a comparatively uncontroversial
window into human nature. Which cannot be said about two of his
previous books, The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate, which argued
that language is an evolutionary adaptive response to a set of problems
and that human nature is primarily genetically innate. This may not
sound that big a deal, but the knock-on ripples are. Follow Pinker's
arguments to their logical conclusions, his critics argue, and you
quickly reach a world where parents are redundant and biological and
racial differences are genetically determined.

"I've never argued
that humans are massively hot-wired," he says. "What I was trying to
point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you
identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis. We
are not the same as cats, so it follows we must have some innate
circuitry that allows us to talk and to be self-aware. All our
behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. With its 100
billion neurons, the brain is highly complex and unpredictable; so what
might look like freewill from the outside and what might feel like
freewill from the inside is not some mysterious violation of the laws
of physics."

Pinker goes on to suggest that we'll probably never
really know exactly what part genetics plays in the differences between
races and genders - "it's a taboo field of academic research" - but he
has been prepared to accept that the claim that men and women's talents
- and, by extension, those of different races - overlap but are not
identical is quantifiably defensible. "Those who argue this is nothing
more than racism or sexism are guilty of statistical illiteracy," he
says. "Besides which, just because someone may have a genetic
predisposition towards doing a particular thing, it doesn't follow they
will automatically do it." Pinker himself is a case in point. While
most scientists would accept that humans are genetically programmed to
reproduce, Pinker has steadfastly resisted the temptation.

This
could well be just a reflection of the relatively low status he gives
parents in child development. "The idea that children are passive
repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively
overstated," he says. "A child's peer group is a far greater
determinant of its development and achievements than parental
aspiration." Large parts of government social policy, too, are governed
by the principle that parents are central to child development. So what
does he suggest government should do instead? "It's a tough one," he
admits. "But I think it would be better off looking at how cultural
change is effected within society."

His views on parenting don't
make him an easy person to interview. The standard practice is to try
and draw together various threads from childhood to present a coherent
portrait of how a life and ideas have been shaped. Yet all that goes
out of the window with Pinker if you want to play by his rules. So what
sort of him would be talking to me now if he hadn't had Jewish parents
and hadn't been born in Montreal in the 1950s? "You mean if I'd been
kidnapped at birth and placed with a working-class family somewhere
completely different?" he laughs. "There are a lot of variables, but
there's a better than average probability I would have been doing
something in much the same scientific and intellectual fields."

Like
most kids, Pinker had no real idea of what he wanted to do. "I used to
like reading," he offers. "We had a set of encyclopaedias and I must
have got through about 90% of them." So he was a bit of a nerd? "Yes.
Wait, I mean a bit. I did have friends and I did subscribe to Rolling
Stone." He was also a bit of a hippy on the sly - still is, you
suspect, as he keeps his hair unfashionably long - and when the time
came to go to college, he signed up for the year-old Dawson's College
in Montreal. "It promised interdisciplinary courses and alternative
styles of learning. I'm glad I went, but I came to realise there was
something to be said for more traditional learning."

Cosmic questions

He
went on to McGill University to read psychology. "When I heard about
cognitive psychology [the study of human thinking and intelligence], I
was hooked. Here was a subject situated between the great cosmic
questions of human nature and the intractable experimental sciences."
From there on in, Pinker had his mind set on a career as an academic.
His mother wanted him to become a psychiatrist - "it was the 1970s and
there were endless scare stories in the papers about people with PhDs
driving cabs, and she wanted me to have something to fall back on". Not
for the first time, Pinker chose to underline the futility of parental
intervention and his career has since followed a high-flying mainstream
trajectory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and
Harvard.

There's no escaping the sharpness of Pinker's mind and
his ideas, but he's also a very skilful agent provocateur, who
understands perfectly how controversy can raise the profile. When the
late Stephen Jay Gould - "he was the pontiff of US science who was
always on the side of the angels. He even got to fill the slot reserved
for intellectuals writing about baseball" - attacked evolutionary
psychology as fatuous in the New York Review in 1997, Pinker did
himself no harm by being the one to take him on. He says now that the
spat was blown out of all proportion by journalists - "they just
weren't used to anyone criticising Gould" - but he hasn't always seemed
that eager to set the record straight in the past.

Pinker
certainly shows no signs of abandoning his successful formula of mixing
the counter-intuitive with good science. He had sleepless nights before
the publication of The Blank Slate - "I knew I was going to get
vilified for it in some quarters" - and he'd do well to get in a good
supply of sleeping pills before his next book comes out - on how the
world is now a far safer place, with fewer wars, genocides and
homicides than at any time in its history. But is there a chance his
controversy will become the norm and that he'll end up as a national
institution just as his old sparring partner once was? "I like ice
hockey," he laughs. "No one is ever going to ask me to write about that
as a metaphor for life. It's just a bunch of people beating the shit
out of each other chasing the puck." Sounds like as good a metaphor as
any to me.

Curriculum vitae

Age: 53

Job: Johnstone Family professor of psychology, Harvard University

Books: The Language Instinct; The Blank Slate; The Stuff of Thought

Likes: Ice hockey, photography, kayaking

Dislikes: grading exams, income tax, paying bills

Married to Rebecca Goldstein, no children

· The Stuff of Thought is published by Penguin at £9.99. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875